Exploradio Origins

You may know semiconductors from computers: they’re a material somewhere between an electrical conductor and an electrical insulator that can be used as an extremely fast switch. However, semiconductors are also what we have to thank for the revolution in energy-efficient LED lighting technology. “One of them is gallium nitride. The reason it's a good light bulb is, if you can excite an electron, say, with applying a voltage, then when it de-excites, it emits a photon. And these are the photons that make it a good light bulb.” Kathy Kash is professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University. While the photons of white light from gallium nitride might have replaced many of the incandescent light bulbs in your own home, researchers like Kash are still seeking the rainbow. “For lighting technology, what you really care about is spanning the red to the blue. And there's not yet a single material system that will do that efficiently.” Kash and her group are working on the next step

"There are technologies that we can use now like next generation sequencing where it allows us to take a really teeny tiny piece of DNA or RNA and generate thousands if not millions of measurements. And then we sort of look at each other like, now what do we do?" Jill Barnholtz-Sloan is a biostatistician and professor in Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine. She’s using statistics and math to help researchers untangle risk factors and survival factors for different types of brain tumors. "There's lots of different ways that you can study a disease in a population, but we focus a lot on, what are the causes and risk factors for developing brain tumors - and then what are the factors associated with response to treatment and survival?" These seemingly simple questions are very hard to answer, but Barnholtz-Sloan’s statistical analyses enable investigators to draw mathematically valid conclusions from huge data sets. "It's very daunting to look at these huge datasets and

“It's known that the universe is expanding; of course it's been known since the 1920s. The surprise we were hit with in the 1990s is that the expansion is accelerating, and so it's a big mystery, what causes that to happen,” Harsh Mathur said. Mathur is a professor of Physics at Case Western Reserve University, and he’s exploring the mathematics that could explain how the universe accelerates as it expands. “It's quite challenging, you know, because Einstein's equations work so well in the solar system, so how do you modify them without damaging the fact that they work in the solar system? How do you make them have an effect on the cosmelogical scale?” Mathur and his collaborators are looking at the idea of a new “fifth” force, one that is shielded in contexts like our solar system, but can be felt on the largest scale of the universe. In part, drawing their inspiration from how the electrostatic force can be shielded by metallic objects. “We started off by just writing down the

The fishermen of Iceland became concerned around a decade ago. The capelin, a small fish that’s a staple catch, and a crucial link in the ocean ecosystem, stopped migrating like they used to. To whom did they turn? A team of mathematicians. “So what I think about is particles but each particle gets to make decisions. And it makes decisions based on what the particles around it are doing," Dr. Alethea Barbaro said. Barbaro is a mathematician at Case Western Reserve University. "So I think about where a particle is, where it wants to go, then I move it there by multiplying it by some time step." She models the behavior of social organisms using an interacting particle model, where each particle represents one, or a group of, organisms. Her group found this works really well for predicting the movements of the capelin. “It's really, it's a dance between the math and the science. We actually were able to take out the homing instinct and recreate the migration without the homing instinct.

Some of you may have heard of SETI: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The idea is that if there's an advanced alien civilization, they’d try to contact us using radio. So we should look for radio signals from space that look like messages. "In the 21 st century, if you ask how do we communicate the most efficient amount of information over the longest distances, the answer is not radio, it’s fiber optics and optical and infrared signals that are going through cables," said Corbin Covault, professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University. "And indeed if you could have a pulsed laser, you could actually send information much more efficiently in the optical and infrared than you can in the radio." While he's a gamma-ray astronomer who looks for flashes of light to study stellar phenomena, he's realized the techniques his group uses could be applied to the next-generation SETI if alien civilizations are communicating with us by flashes of optical laser light. "To look

A research group at Case Western Reserve University, led by professor of biomedical engineering Dustin Tyler, works with neural implants in people who’ve lost limbs to restore not only motion with prosthetics, but also the sense of touch. "We spent a lot of time understanding how our language, the electrical language, is translated into the human perception, predominantly in terms of sense of touch," Tyler said. "The first time we went in with our subject, we had no idea what was going to happen. So we first turned on the first stimulus pulses and he said, 'Wow, that's my thumb. That's the first time I felt my thumb since the accident.'" Tyler’s implants have around 30 channels of information to work with, but normal human nerves can have hundreds. The trick is to figure out what language these nerves speak in order to convey normal sensation. "While he felt his thumb, it was like, if your hand falls asleep and as you're waking up, you get that tingling feeling," Tyler said. "So we

"If we find life on another planet, it's likely going to be microbial," said Ashley Manning-Berg, assistant professor in geology at The University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. "So a lot of the focus for evidence for life is not just to learn about the ecosystems on early Earth, it's a way of telling us that if life evolved and then died on Mars, what do we look for? Manning-Berg is studying how billion-year-old fossils of microorganisms were preserved on Earth, so we can know what to look for on other planets. “So if you have a microfossil that is torn and kind of just looks like maybe a little squiggle in a rock, how do we know that's a microfossil? So by looking at the morphologies of the rocks that we know have life, we can get a sense of whether or not that's a microbial morphology,” said Berg. “Looking at the chemistry, so is there carbon there? Is that carbon thermally altered? Has it been changed since its deposition? Berg is also studying how the silica that preserves her

Epilepsy is a condition that we usually think of as being in the brain. Doctors typically identify it by measuring brain activity. However, new evidence has emerged showing that the brain may not be the only place we can see epilepsy. Roberto Galan is an adjunct associate professor of electrical engineering at Case Western Reserve University. “When I investigated the electrocardiograms - the electrical activity of the heart - in patients with epilepsy, and in control patients, I found significant differences in the rhythm that the heart displays," Galan said. By analyzing the EKGs of people with epilepsy, he found that their heart rate was much more affected by their breathing than the heart rates of people without epilepsy. “We could see enhanced synchrony between the lungs and the heart, or respiration and the heart, even before epilepsy was diagnosed from the brain's electrical activity,” said Galan. "So it may be a predictor of epilepsy even before it manifests as seizures.” If we

In the early 20 th century, physicists discovered cosmic rays- energetic particles zooming through deep space. Many of these come from the sun, and can cause the northern lights. However, a few, very mysteriously, come from somewhere else with enormous energy. “The real puzzle is no one has any idea what in the universe is capable of doing that," said Corbin Covault, professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University. "There's some ideas, like massive black holes sucking material down in the middle of galaxies, but when they do the calculations it's really, really not obvious.” To investigate the origin of these mysterious particles, scientists like Covault from all over the world teamed up to build the Pierre Auger observatory, in Argentina. “It's literally the size of Rhode Island - 3,000 square kilometers - spread out over the ground. Our sixteen hundred particle detectors, they're primarily they're just pure water,” Covault said. “But when the particles hit the water tank they

The schistosome worm causes schistosomiasis, which just might be the biggest parasitic disease you’ve never heard of. “You get it walking in water that's infected with infectious snails,” said Emmitt Jolly, associate professor of biology at Case Western Reserve University. “There are almost 240 million people infected with schistosomes, and about 300,000 people are dying.” Jolly is unravelling the genetics of the schistosome to find ways to attack it with drugs. Step one is to figure out which genes do what. “Our lab developed over-expression technology in schistosomes. You put in a gene, and over-express that gene,” Jolly said. “Whatever targets that that gene normally turns on now get up-regulated, and it gives you a clue as to what the function of that gene is.” By turning up a gene, or over-expressing it, you make it easier to see what that gene might be doing in the organism. Jolly’s next step is to take advantage of recently developed CRISPR-Cas gene-editing technology, which

“Cultural geology in my eye is the interface of geology and human culture,” Joe Hannibal said. Joe Hannibal is curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History . He’s a fossil expert, but he’s also used his fossil and rock identification skills to track the movements of cultural materials. "When the Euro-Americans came into different parts of the country, they would first establish mills. Well, a lot of those mills have then burned down,” Hannibal said. "But millstones, well, they're made out of stone." Hannibal was examining some historic millstones in Ohio when he noticed they contained tiny spheres of fossilized algae, called charophytes. “So I wrote in my notebook, 'charophyte?' and came back and realized, oh my galoshes, these are charophytes and they must mean something and they're telling me something,” Hannibal said. Both Ohioans and Europeans made millstones out of a type of stone called chert, but only millstones from the Paris Basin contained

When we think about it, we usually remember to breathe when we’re awake. But who’s at the controls when we’re sleeping? “We’re still continuing to understand the coupling between the neural control in the brain stem and the controlled system, which is the nasal pharynx and oral pharynx and the position of the tongue," said Kingman Strohl, professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics at Case Western Reserve University . He’s interested in how the brain’s breathing control system can go awry, leading to blockages or pauses in our breathing, called apneas, that can wake us up. They keep us from getting good sleep. “All apneas during sleep all have a reduction in the neural activation of the system,” Strohl said. Studying how our brain controls our breathing got Strohl and his colleagues thinking about treating apneas electrically, sort of like how we use pacemakers to treat the heart. “We actually inserted fine wires into the hypoglossal nerve in humans, and found that we could

To live and function, we know cells have to eat and reproduce. But, they also have to take out the trash. What seems like a simple chore to us is actually a matter of life or death for the cell, and drug designers are finding this useful in the fight against disease. “If you have, let's say, something toxic to the cell, the cell tries to eliminate that toxin by encapsulating it and getting rid of it,” said Dr. Jürgen Bosch . Cells form fatty acid bubbles around their garbage using a protein called ATG8. ATG8 has to connect, lock-and-key, with another protein, ATG3, in order to break down the trash in a process called “autophagy.” Bosch, a research scientist at Case Western Reserve University, designs drugs to try and mess up autophagy in disease cells. “The drug has to be made in such a way that it fits into that interface between the two proteins,” Bosch said. “Ten years ago, people in the industry thought it's impossible.” Bosch is designing drug molecules to stop ATG8 from fitting

Mathematics and biology sound like pretty distant relatives, but for Wanda Strychalski, an assistant professor of mathematics at Case Western Reserve University, they’re a perfect match. “I really see mathematical biology - or mathematics, as another tool or assay for lab scientists to use to try and understand really complicated data," Strychalski said. Strychalski has been developing mathematical simulations to learn how cells, especially cancer cells, migrate around your body by flexing their stiff internal structure, called a cytoskeleton, which pushes and pulls the cell’s membrane, the barrier between the cell and the outside world. “So as it’s migrating, the cytoskeleton is rearranging and then causing this motion to occur,” Strychalski said. “We start out with a minimal model based on the results from experiments, and then see if indeed, is that how it works, and usually, that's not true. So usually the one thing with the model is that we can say, well, this doesn’t happen with

Humans have had to live with malaria for a long time. So long, in fact, that we even see changes in our genome that protect us from the disease. "Sickle cell anemia probably emerged in human populations approximately ten to twelve thousand years ago. And this occurred coincidental with the change in lifestyle and agricultural settlements. So there was enough population densities of people that mix with population densities of mosquitos," Jim Kazura said. Two copies of the sickle cell gene give you malformed blood cells, or sickle cell anemia. But, one copy of the gene makes your blood cells just weird enough that, 90% of the time, the malaria parasite can’t invade them. Jim Kazura is professor in the Center for Global Health and Diseases at Case Western Reserve University . He studies factors affecting naturally-occurring immunity against Malaria, particularly in young children. "People have done studies on children with sickle cell anemia in sub-Saharan Africa now - forty to fifty

It seems our brains are never truly quiet. We dream when we are asleep, and in sensory deprivation experiments, participants start hallucinating within 15 minutes. Where does this spontaneous activity in our brains come from? "My contention is, based on experiments and computational models, that spontaneous activity is triggered by what is called 'noise,'" said Roberto Galan. Galan is an adjunct associate professor in electrical engineering at Case Western Reserve University. He studies how our brains - unlike electronic devices - work with internal noise, and how that noise may lead to the brain’s spontaneous activity. "The sources of that noise go back to the molecular level," Galan said. "What I think my community has missed is the link between what it is and what it is good for. So with one of my previous students I developed, I improved algorithms and computational models to understand the origin of that noise." Galan realized that the brain’s hard-wired circuitry –the way our

When we cool things down, classically, we can think of the atoms moving around inside the material getting slower and slower until they stop moving. That should make really cold things really boring, right? “ Supercool liquid helium crawls out of containers," Nandini Trivedi said. "And certain supercool metals lose all their resistance. So as substances get cold they start behaving in really unusual ways. ” Trivedi is professor of physics at Ohio State University. Her specialty is the theory of quantum matter: figuring out how these weird effects, like superfluidic liquid helium flowing up out of its container, or superconductors losing their electrical resistance, are actually the result of quantum mechanical properties like the fuzziness about knowing where a particle is vs. how fast it’s moving. “ Each atom has a little wave associated with it. As you cool these atoms or molecules, their fuzziness starts increasing; the uncertainty in their position starts increasing. Even if these

“ People always want to know where they came from, right? They get excited by new discoveries of dinosaurs, but they become curious by the discovery of early human fossils. ” Yohannes Haile-Selassie is a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and is a paleoanthropologist studying human evolution. As a graduate student in 1994, he was part of a group searching for fossils in Ethiopia’s Middle Awash region, and found a small, delicate fragment of a hand bone. This fragment lead to the discovery of a 4.4 million-year-old skeleton that would change the earlier chapters of human origins. “ Ardipithecus ramidus is the species name, but the skeleton was nicknamed Ardi, ” Haile-Selassie said. You may have heard of our most famous ancestor, the 3.2 million year old hominid skeleton named Lucy. Her species was the earliest known hominid species for two decades, but then Ardi turned out to be much older. “ The discovery of Ardi has informed us we should even expect more primitive

Each time our cells grow and divide, they have to perfectly copy out almost a billion elements of genetic code. Of course, perfect almost never happens. So as soon as there was a genetic code, life had to evolve a way to fix DNA mismatches. But sometimes people inherit mutations in those DNA mismatch repair genes, and then you have really challenging cancers. But, at the bottom of this, there lies some hope in our own immune systems. “Very recently, we realized that those cancers have a ton of mutations in them,” said Stan Gerson , distinguished professor and the Director of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center at Case Western Reserve University . “You don’t see it in the normal tissue, you only see it in the rapidly growing cells.” Gerson discovered that the broken mismatch repair system making the cancer cells with a ton of mutations in them is actually the key to training our immune system to recognizing and killing the cancer. “Our newest chemotherapies are immune treatments that

In order to function, the cells in our bodies need to coordinate and pass information, say, if we need a burst of energy to flee a threat. But, without eyes, ears, or even radios, how do they signal this information reliably? “The only way to communicate, and this is actually a big challenge for biology, is by basically sending out groups of molecules which then can interact with other molecules," said Professor Mike Hinczewski, a biophysicist at Case Western Reserve University . "There’s going to be lots of noise, and so biology has to figure out a way of compensating for that degradation of the signal." Hinczewski uses physics and math to describe systems in biology, like how cells get the noise out of their chemical signals. “It turns out that the mathematics involved in removing the noise from the signal is quite analogous to the mathematics that was developed around the time of World War II to basically deal with things like anti-aircraft guns,” Hinczewski said. Early mechanical

Scientists have spent centuries studying how matter works. They’ve boiled it, they’ve frozen it, and they’ve even thrown it into particle colliders and smashed it up. They’ve learned a lot about what matter does in these conditions, but--that’s just what we can do on Earth.